A recent management-level survey on IT service delivery threw up the question, "when do you think you are likely to roll out Windows Vista in your organisation?"
At a summary level, the responses to this question were not particularly interesting. Just under a quarter of organisations said they would adopt within the next year …

COMMENTS

The proof of the pudding is in the eating..... as any Lovers of IT will tell you

"We can sum this up by saying that an organisation is significantly more likely to be adopting Vista in the short term if the following are true: ....... etc etc."

Well, of course, for they have realised that Vista is a Virtualisation Application layering Tool for Implementation of Good IT Practices...Social Policies.

And with Windows also providing MetaDataMined Views for Incorporation.

You don't actually Think that Computers and Software aren't programmed to sneak a peek at what IT is doing, surely? It is their raison d'etre. Stealth for an Unfair Competitive Advantage to fuel the Capitalist and very Fascist Engine. Bill and Warren can talk a good Socialist leaning but they don't appear to be allowed to act upon it.... although I would love to be proved wrong on that possibility.

And you can blame Man's Limited Intelligence Processing of Information for what it does and doesn't do, with Total Information Awareness Knowledge.

It might have nothing to do...

...with the intrinsic qualities of Vista.

Vista is the next upgrade. Well set-up (organised, well-resourced, knowledgeable) IT outfits will be better placed to take the upgrade step than those who've been starved of money and personnel, so are staggering along with kit that would need replacing wholesale to run Vista adequately.

Get it over with

So we should adopt Vista because of peer pressure?

"There is a similarly strong correlation between Vista adoption and other behaviours that are commonly considered to be indicators of good or best practice."

Healthy people are slimmer than average, so supermodels are the healthiest people of all. As long as we're treating correlation as causality.

"More to the point though, it suggests that those organisations that are more culturally switched on to good IT management practice seem to be saying that Vista has a positive contribution to make."

More to the point it suggests that fashion supermodels are saying starvation makes you healthy and since they're the healthiest people they should know! Because I just did a substitution followed by an implied causality and you're supposed to be so stupid you don't understand what I just did.

My hidden message: JUST BUY THE DAMN VISTA BECAUSE IT'S WHAT SOME OF YOUR PEERS ARE DOING AND I'M CLAIMING THAT THEY ARE CLEVER FOR DOING IT AND SO YOU ARE DUMB FOR NOT DOING IT.

Then IT 'performance' is dependant on pandering to people with no understanding of computing. So its hardly surprising that they will insist they need what ever product has the shiniest broacher. Even if that's an operating system that requires an entire gigabyte of memory just to launch applications and manipulate a file system!

Shock? Better managed departments handle change better!

If the next big thing was Bananas for every desktop, I would expect that better managed (ie those highlighted as having formal monitoring and therefore, you'd guess, better managed) IT departments would be more aggressive (confident) in their Banana roll-out.

Sure, if Bananas (or Vista) was considered a retrograde step then you wouldn't see the trend, but that well managed IT depts are pushing ahead with Vista is no particular endorsement for Vista (or Bananas) beyond that it is 'satisfactory'.

from Microsofts PR Dept?

"Of course, the alternative explanation is that more organised IT departments are better able move quickly and figure they might as well get the inevitable over with, but that seems like a far less plausible explanation."

It'll be all you can buy

Dax was spot on. Although expanding on his/her point: Since MS is going to be taking away the option of buying XP soon, an IT department _has_ to roll out Vista as it will soon be all you can purchase. You can't be in a position of not being able to procure new PCs. It's not an endorsement of Vista; it's realism in the face of MS's forced upgrade strategy.

Correlation != Causation

However I would say that IT performance is measured it's far more likely that IT departments are installing Vista because it meets their targets rather than because they believe it to be the right thing to do.

..and if the mythical man month has taught us anything I'd also say it's far more likely to f*ck up big-style.

Positive Contribution

"it suggests that those organisations that are more culturally switched on to good IT management practice seem to be saying that Vista has a positive contribution to make."

What a crock.

This comment simply reinforces the point that people who muck about with statistics can make them 'prove' any concusion they want to.

To me, all your statistics are saying is that the more 'formal' IT departments are more likely to go forward with upgrades in the short term.

As for why this might be, my opinion is that these types of department are more likely to plan this activity and be able to allocate the resources needed to run the project. More importantly, they are almost certainly more integrated into the upper levels of the company management reporting structure - which means they will find it easier to get signoff from the related business management streams to spend the money!

As usual, there is no doubt in my mind that upgrades are primarily driven by companies on M$ support agreements being coerced by EOL of their existing products - requiring them to buy licenses for the same software again and again.

I work for a big UK retailer where all these points are true. however we have only just recently completed the changeover from NT4 desktops connecting to Netware 4 servers to XP and Server 2003 with AD etc...

I'd be very surprised if we go anywhere near Vista for at least 4-5 years

Hang on...

Last time I checked, Vista wasn't free.

I'm inclined to think that well-run IT departments are more likely to be well-funded IT departments (either because the extra resource makes it easier to do their jobs better or because they are rewarded for doing a good job by having their budgets increased), and therefore they're more likely to roll out the latest and most expensive of any software - because they're the ones that can afford it.

CYA is best practice

Well, well... Here we have a survey that says the most heavily-bureaucratised IT departments are Microsoft's early adopters.

Maybe their formal processes are working well - and I hope so, because the need for performance-monitoring IT is all-too-obvious in our corporations and our government - but I have my doubts about this survey: it records the presence of particular documentation flows, not the effectiveness of the organisation's IT administration.

All too often, box-ticking 'processes' that certify our service reliability are revealed as a chaotic sham when the lights go out and someone has to restart the servers. Could it be that organisations with a thick sheaf of operational studies, proving that they can back out the change, are living in a fool's paradise? Are the studies demonstrating operational savings from Vista's enterprise management an object lesson in objective auditing - or a demonstration that the masters of a sophisticated bureaucracy can find the figures to justify any decision they want?

Could it be that favoured customers - large bureaucratic organisations dominated by 'process' - are statistically-likely to be offered substantial discounts as early adopters by Redmond? I bet the words 'Partner' and 'Strategic' are measurably correlated with a 2007 Vista rollout.

And I'm prepared to bet that you can find surveys in the 1970's, proving that America's most forward-looking and progressive corporations could be identified by their purchases of IBM machinery. There's a famous aphorism that nobody ever got fired for that - but have you ever heard that 'Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft'..?

Here's a final prediction: every single sheet of paper saying that 'X' corporation, department or division should be implementing Vista will be outnumbered three-to-one by cleverly-equivocal memoranda distancing the managers responsible from the consequences. And that's as good an explanation as any from Redmond as to why bureaucracy is correlated with an early Vista rollout.

This is the second time I've seen this "survey"

The first time was in _Computerworld_ magazine.

The overall tone and much of the phrasing was so similar as to make me suspicious that both writers took their "data" from a Microsoft press release.

My day job *is* pretty much the IT Department, and we do enough monitoring to know what's what (when there are only two people in IT, a lot of formal monitoring isn't really necessary). We plan to deploy Vista *only* when we are forced to do so because we can't get XP any more. We do have several Vista machines in the IT Department - for testing, and familiarization. Our overall impression is that it's slow, clunky, looks and operates like it's designed for use by unprofessional 4-year-old children, and has more annoyances that XP did at initial rollout.

When a corporation pays bloggers to start a fake grassroots movement, we call it "astroturf." What should we call a fake wave of favorable reviews?

Boldly Going ....

"Then IT 'performance' is dependant on pandering to people with no understanding of computing" ...... Stop the Pandering and Invite them to Stand and Deliver/Invest in ITFutures.... in a Reality Virtualised.

Who's not rolling it out?

Intel's not doing it. AMD's not doing it. Dell's not doing it. HP's not doing it. Do we see a trend? Most of the biggies have enough XP licenses to last until the end of the year. I know of people at two large corporations who were issued new laptops in the last few weeks. XP SP2 with Office 2003.

Forget upgrades, many companies aren't even doing it for new purchases.